Welcome to the Thomas Multimedia Web Design Blog!
First Topic: Web Design Standards
While this topic might sound boring already, there are some good reasons why websites should be developed to comply with web design standards. Web standards are created and modified by a group called the W3C.
The W3C, AKA the World Wide Web Consortium are an organisation that has been around since 1994, fine tuning how website language should be written. They are the recognised authority on web languages.
Some common languages can be used to create virtually any website or application. You may have heard of HTML. HTML is the predecessor to the recommended XHTML. Other languages include CSS which controls the style of a website and XML/RSS which can be use to syndicate content across different sites.
The benefit of writing a web standards compliant website are many;
- cross-browser compatability: The website will display correctly in all web browsers (eg. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera). This may seem a non-issue… doesn’t everyone use Internet Explorer anyway? Well the short answer is NO! More on the crimes of Internet Explorer later but in short they have made little effort to enforce the official web standards.
- cross-platform compatability: As the internet moves onto new platforms such as handheld-PC’s, mobile phones and other strange and not so strange appliances (think fridges), they need and should have a common language whereby the same site will render correctly.
- Performance: The less work the device has to do working out how to display the web page, the quicker it can do it! This can only be achieved with standard languages
It is alarming to note that the vast majority of websites would be in trouble if overnight internet browsers became 100% standards compliant. What’s… Read more